Saturday, June 7, 2014

The occurrence of wildfires on our public lands is an ever increasing
threat. Generally when we think of a
wildfire the scene of a heavily timbered mountain landscape comes to mind, however
today wildfires are reaching father into previously unaffected ecosystems
including our own desert backyard.

According to the BLM’s records, prior to 2005, there is no documented
occurrence of a wildfire in the Gold Butte region. In June of 2005, following
heavy spring rains, there was a large wildfire in the Gold Butte region started
by a lightning strike.

In my goal to implement better community stewardship of our
public lands, I am working to better understand the wildfire events that have occurred
in the Gold Butte region. I do this in the possibility of better management, from
better understanding, of our desert landscape. Through a better understanding of our
environment, we can better manage the devastating effects of another wildfire
event on the desert ecosystem.

My goal is to build a model that will create a risk index for
the Gold Butte region to predict the likelihood of where the next fire will start
and spread. The first step in building this model is to understand the
landscape of the area that has previously burned. I chose for my area of
interest the Fork and Tramp fires. The BLM provides the geospatial data for the
location of the burn areas.

The data that I was able to locate on the web for this area
included elevation, vegetation, soils, geology, landforms, average rainfall by
year, intermittent washes and roads. The
next step is to clip all of this data to the perimeter of the burn area. After the
data is clipped to the boundary of the fire I performed spatial analysis to
calculate the percent area of each type of feature within the data to see if
there is any correlation as to why the fire burned in the area that it
did. The following are some of the
results that I found.

Geology

LandForm

Soil

Vegetation

There were two different vegetation datasets that I found so i used both to try and create the best model that I could.